 Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Claire Mason. I'm the director of support services at You Think Education. And today I wanted to share with you just some of the lessons we've learned over the last couple of years in just upgrading many, many, many clients and some of the takeaways we've wanted to share with you today. So for us, as you may know, we're a fairly recent partner here in the UK. So most of our clients are based in the US. And the upgrade season tends to follow the traditional cycle of the academic year. So one of those times of the year is the winter. So I was tying in the Christmas carol. So over the Christmas holidays, the winter break, usually mid-December through mid-January, is one of the most popular times. Then around the time of commencement, late May. And around our Independence holiday in July, that's usually when there's a break between maybe a summer term that starts after the 4th of July. So that's another really popular time for us. Increasingly, though, we are seeing our clients are continuously offering courses. So sometimes it can be really tough to find that golden moment of opportunity that makes sense to have the downtime to do the upgrade. But that's one of the approaches we take to maintenance for our clients is we work with you to find the time that is exactly right for you. You're not going to be, it's not like we upgrade all of our clients at once, whether you're ready or not. So to give you a sense of how busy we are in a typical year in the past year, we've done over 200 upgrades in the last year. More than 50 are currently on my calendar, on our calendar before the end of 2019. And these were some stats I put together as of last week. And I think we've maybe even scheduled a 10 to 12 upgrades since then. And as we prepare to bring our clients to a new version, there are a few things we do. One of the things we specialize in is SIS integrations. So that gives us some time to test our plugins, make sure everything's working smoothly. Some of our most popular plugins just kind of feel things out. We often do live professional development and training with our clients. Some of them have that built-in that they always do some sort of session with us, leading up to an upgrade. And we also do a lot of webinars. I think we ever since 3.2, we've been doing a webinar with each new release just to kind of get the word out there and get clients excited about some of the new features they might gain from an upgrade. So this just kind of represents that season, as you can see, the peaks and valleys of how often we upgrade. And this is from April of last year to up to a week ago. And I also wanted to show, we do plenty of minor upgrades as well. So that's the smaller wave there down at the bottom. We often have clients come to us in our limited support model, they say, hey, what's going on with this? Is, oh, maybe, oh, congratulations, you found a bug. And congratulations, it is fixed in this point version. Great news. So we often do point upgrades on the fly. Evenings, whatever, it works best for the client to make sure that whatever that issue is is fixed. And this just kind of shows you what's coming up in the next several months for us. So as you can see, May is going to be very busy. I'm surprised there aren't more July upgrades because I mentioned in the past week, I think we've added a few to the calendar there. So now you kind of have a sense of the scope, how many upgrades we've done. Now I'll share with you the lessons we've learned through walking all those clients through this process. So lesson number one, it's important to upgrade regularly for a variety of reasons. Security patches, bug fixes, new features. We want our clients to stay up to date so that there's so many small but mighty things that get added between versions and can really dramatically change the user experience. Obviously, we want all of our clients to stay happy and especially in the United States, there is competition out there from other learning management systems. So we want them to have those latest and greatest features in their hands so that way they don't feel like Moodle is old and clunky and they might look somewhere else if they're ranked particularly several versions ago. Another reason is the bigger the jump you make, the harder the change is. I know that we all have tales of, oh, we just upgraded from, I think I heard someone mention from 3.0 to 3.6. That's a big jump. So especially if you're changing from one of the classic themes to the boost theme, it's really change management that we try to be supportive of that. It's in each individual institution. So we usually recommend that clients stay within two versions. Like I think many of you, based on the number of hands I saw yesterday, about 3.6, some clients prefer to stay on the long-term support releases and that's just fine. But we do want people to stay relatively current and we follow pretty closely and often use the Moodle roadmap in the development cycle sort of as incentive to say, hey, bugs aren't gonna be patching this version soon. So it's time to upgrade. Lesson number two is that test sites are your friend. Part of our process is that we spin up a copy of their live site, upgrade it, and allow them to kick the tires, test any plugins, third-party integrations that they might rely on and make sure that there are no surprises. Explore the scope of the changes, know what's coming. Like I said, test the plugins. And we also see this as an opportunity to take a step back and especially if you're making a bigger jump, look at some of those settings or even settings that have been around for a long time but maybe you had it disabled for some reason but now it's something you wanna revisit or I think pretty popular is tweaking the activity completion defaults to just make it easier for instructors to set it up correctly without having to manually do that themselves. And very popular as well is to give your site a makeover. Like I said, if you were on a classic theme and now you're switching to Boost, we work with you through that process to get it looking just so. Daniel was just giving a presentation earlier about how we really dig in and work through the CSS. Some clients prefer to tinker with it themselves. Other clients say, we know nothing and we'll do it for you. So we really see that as a partnership. Increasingly, we see clients want to match the branding of the college website. So for some, they like the clean look of Boost, others want some more visually marketing, branding-like elements. So we typically suggest third-party plugins like Lambda or Fordcent. Okay, lesson number three, don't fear change. Change is good, but you gotta be ready for it. So one of the most surprising things to me in 3.3 and 3.4, depending on which jump clients we're making, the end dates. Great, end dates, we've been waiting for that. It's here, awesome. Then the course overview was added. The amount of clients that didn't see the impact of how the end dates would control how the course, if they're using the dashboard, would show on their dashboard or not show on their dashboard. They didn't see that coming and it was sometimes painful because they didn't use their test site. So let back to lesson number two, that's why it's so important and we really encourage clients to use their test site so that they can see this, do some usability testing so that they can anticipate those questions when instructors are suddenly, where is my course? Oh, it doesn't have an end date, so it might be in a different tab than you would expect it to be. And all of that makes it important to plan ahead. If you've done your testing, you know what's coming, you can communicate that to faculty, you can develop, redevelop your documentation, update your screenshots, maybe prepare some training videos and materials to just kind of help make the transition as smooth as possible. And I think these kind of go hand in hand, be prepared. So developing some sort of not only that communication plan, but some training, we offer a, we would call it like a train the trainer or a what's new for admins session where we might just walk through with the LMS administrators who, what to expect, what kind of changes are coming that reading the documentation is one thing, but actually kind of seeing it in action, we often do it on their test site so they could be prepared. The faculty, some choose to train the faculty themselves, other do the training in-house, but they wanna get up to speed themselves. We found that an ounce of training is worth, it's weighed in gold as far as making that transition as smooth as possible. That was a really stark difference that we saw between the clients that had a smooth upgrade and were happy afterwards and those that was a little rockier. And as I mentioned, anticipating the questions. If you're prepared, if you've done your homework, you've done the testing, you've received training, you can kind of maybe prepare some FAQs. We've had some kind of, oh, I know they're not gonna know to look for that or develop, maybe customize some of the built-in user tours because you say, oh, I think people are gonna struggle here. Let's tweak it so that we can actually draw attention to that. And lesson number five, kind of reference on the other slides as well, but communication is really what it comes down to. I often have a lot of regular meetings with clients leading up to an upgrade to say, okay, what are, you know, it goes beyond more like, this is when the site's gonna be down and here's what the version we're going to is. Kind of maybe doing some teasers in advance to let them know what's coming. Like I said, update your documentation, prepare some FAQs and then, you know, be prepared for when that flood of questions comes in. Are you gonna have sort of self-help support resources? Are they gonna be calling or contacting your help desk? Whatever your support structures are for instructors and students that needs to be, they need to be part of that sort of effort to help get the word out. So to recap, it is very important that you upgrade regularly, that you use your test site. So important, don't fear change. If you use your test site, you'll know what's coming. Be prepared and communicate. So I mean, I think too many of you who administrate sites, a lot of this is obvious, but you know, when you see it at scale with as many upgrades as we've done over the past year, it is really, it becomes stark those the differences between the institutions that kind of follow these lessons and those that don't. So thank you very much. Thanks, Claire. We've got a question straight away in there. This gentleman over here is gonna ask the first question. Then if you've got another question, raise your hand and Bob and Halvin will come with the microphone. Thank you, Claire. Communication is key and it's very difficult to communicate with academics and get them to read emails, et cetera. So one of the things we've been doing is running a query in the database and find when assessments, quizzes, turn it in assignments, anything with an end date, in or around the upgrade date and just email them directly. So we can say, dear sats and such, you have an assessment in this module, this is the assessment title, et cetera, et cetera. And it's a bit laborious. I've just done it, it took me about two hours to go through about 40 modules or something. But people really appreciate it. And because you tend to get quite a good bit of coverage in there, because normally there's more than one person on the module, I email everybody who's a teacher on the course. So it's a good way of getting some heads up for the really key people that need to know. Yeah, that's a fantastic idea. Thank you. I'll definitely be sharing that. Any other questions? That was on the front here, yeah, thank you. Hello, Claire. So much for sharing all those lessons from you guys. Of course, you guys have a lot more experience in upgrading 200 a year. That's a lot of upgrades compared to our university when we do it only once a year. The question I had was regarding your major and minor upgrades. So we have an upgrade coming up. So I'm trying to manage the plugin upgrades for that. Because we're moving to 3.6, there are some plugins that do not have support for 3.6 right now. So should there be an annual process or a regular process to upgrade those plugins? Do you guys don't go for plugins that are not supported by the latest version? How do you guys manage the plugins side of things? Yeah, great question. So typically, I think one of the main reasons why I think the test site is so important. For point upgrades, it's not usually as much of a concern, but for the major upgrades, typically what we do is when we hand the client their dev site, we say, here's a list of all the additional plugins that you currently have installed. You might forget, some have a lot, some have a few. And usually, in our checklist that we provide them of things to go through and test, we say, hey, we've flagged these. They do not currently have a 3.6 version. Please make sure you test these. And then we kind of, sometimes it's a deal breaker. There's one that just breaks, and they say, OK, we're going to wait. We're going to postpone our upgrade until it's supported. Or often, we find, oh, if it's at least up to 3.4, it's probably going to work, but you should still test it. Please test it. And we work through that with them and kind of. But we want to empower them to really have a part in that process, because they selected these plugins over the years. You're welcome. Got a question from Tim over here. Well, actually, I was going to comment on that same issue from the other side of the fence. As someone who has plugins in the Moodle plugin database, and so they're about to release Moodle 3.7, I'm not going to mark that my plugins are compatible until I have tested my satisfaction that they work. Now, the odds are that 90% of them will just work immediately. So sometimes you will be wanting to upgrade before the plugin developer has had time to test. And therefore, as you say, you have to do your own testing. It's probably not a big deal. If you do that testing, please comment in the plugins database, say, we tried this. It appears to work, because that's really, really helpful. Absolutely. And that's why you give us feedback. Yeah, happy to do that. How many would you say, because I know that historically, people don't upgrade to like 3.7 straight away, for example. Yeah. What would you say, like most of your clients on this dependent by sector? Well, I would say we always, as soon as you guys announce a new version is out, guaranteed I'm going to get at least five support tickets that say, when can we have it? And we say, hey, let's hold back. We usually, our general rule of thumb is we wait until the first .1 version to come out before we would consider it. But then again, we emphasize, hey, this is hot off the press. We really double down on you need to test this before we'll go live. And with 3.6, .1 came out almost immediately. So we waited for .2. That's our general rule of thumb. But again, based on all the feedback we get working with our clients through testing, sometimes that varies. OK. Thank you very much, Claire.